[Illustration: SIR PETER HALKETT, Bart. In command of that part of Braddock's Army that marched through the present Loudoun in 1755.]
We have come to the outbreak of that great world conflict between England and Prussia on the one side against France and Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony on the other which Fiske, writing before the devastation of 1914, called the most memorable war of modern times and which, involving three continents, ultimately passed the vast French territories in Canada and India to the British crown. In European history the contest is known, somewhat inadequately, as the Seven Years War and gave Frederick the Great of Prussia the fateful opportunity to demonstrate his extraordinary military genius; but in America it is known as the French and Indian War from the terrible alliance that the English colonists were forced there to face.
The menace of the French control of Canada had never oppressed the imagination of Virginia as it had that of New England and New York. Distance and lack of colonial unity tended to build in the minds of the Virginia Assembly the belief that it was a matter, to the Old Dominion at least, of secondary interest; though her royal governors, and especially Dinwiddie, recognized its true and pressing danger. Virginia claimed jurisdiction over a vast and largely unknown western territory, including much of what is now western Pennsylvania and that strategic point marking the confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, now covered by the city of Pittsburgh. The French in Canada were well aware of the huge military importance of this "gateway of the west" and, although at the time peace was supposed to exist between England and France, in 1753 sent a small expedition south to take possession of it. News of these Frenchmen in Virginia territory came to Governor Dinwiddie who, in turn, sent the twenty-one year old Washington, already a major in the militia of Virginia, to remonstrate and protest to their commander. On his journey Washington travelled the road to Vestal's Gap and crossed the Blue Ridge at that point. Though he faithfully delivered his message, the English protest was ignored, the French commander asserting that all that domain belonged to his King and that the English had no territorial rights west of the mountains. Thereupon the energetic Dinwiddie decided that war or no war the French should be dislodged. A regiment of 300 Virginians was organized under Colonel Joshua Fry, with Major Washington as second in command, to take possession of the disputed "gateway" and fortify it.